The head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, has announced this week that she will step down from her position. The move comes after Jackson has fought hard against Washington politicians and lobbyists.

Jackson fought significant pushback from Republican lawmakers opposed to her efforts to fight climate change reports Reuters. She was also brought in front of Congress for multiple hearings during her tenure, and even fought dissension within the EPA.

President Obama thanked Jackson for her service and praised her work on several causes including assistance in setting up new fuel economy standards in the United States.

"Under her leadership, the EPA has taken sensible and important steps to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink," Obama said in a statement.

Jackson said in a statement she was "confident the (EPA) ship is sailing in the right direction."

Jackson is expected to step down from her cabinet position after President Obama delivers his State of the Union address in early 2013.

Climate is never stable. Didn't you see the other Dailytech article about the research suggesting human evolution and intelligence occurred exactly because of just how incredibly chaotic climate is?

People like you amuse me due to your horrific lack of modern historical knowledge (let alone geological history). Tornadoes on or near Christmas are also rather common historically for the United States. There was the tornado outbreak in 1982 on Christmas, or the New Year's Eve outbreak in 1947. In fact, there's been quite a number of tornado outbreaks in December/January throughout our records.

Learn some history and you'll and stop freaking out over ever little thing.

quote: Only in the US can you be universally despised for wanting to make the environment cleaner.

Having worked with both sides of the fence where EPA and regulated industries are concerned I can definitely say that the EPA is not the glorious saviours of the environment as they have been held up to be. The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act are good things, but their implementation has been used to get radical agendas in place bypassing congressional approvals for decades.

Also while there are a few scientists within the EPA that I do respect, the number of washouts that happened to land there far outnumber the good ones. There are some who could not make it in a private laboratory that ended up being hired by the EPA and I personally know of people who were fired for falsifying results who were quickly hired by the state level EPA.

The EPA has the same modern analytical instrumentation we have in our lab but the methods they force us to use to report compliance results are based on equipment that is decades old. I spoke with some of their chemist at a conference once about some of the new technology and was told they already use it to produce compliance data, yet when we try to use it we are not allowed to because the methodologies forbid it. When I asked how they can use something that is not approved the answer was "We are the EPA we can use whatever we want" even though if I reported data using that equipment to the EPA my clients would be fined for not having data provided by an approved method. Another instance was about 15 years ago when the pesticide Endothal was added to the list for required monitoring in drinking waters, we tried for almost a year to produce valid results using the EPA provided method of analysis, when we contacted the EPA and asked why it didn't work the answer was simply "That method does not work" turns out they had to have a method of analysis in place by a set deadline and they published what they had with no stipulation that it did not work, it took another year for them to publish one that did. There was also a method use to monitor waste waters for oil that used Freon as a solvent to extract the oil. The EPA banned Freon but did not provide an alternative method for that analysis and were requiring our clients to continue to monitor for the oil and required the same method of analysis even though Freon was now illegal to use. It took at least another year before an approved alternate method was released, while we had to purchase the Freon to use for the method up till then at prices that made an analysis that originally cost about $5 to perform cost us at least $50 for the Freon alone.

The EPA likes to make snap decisions to satisfy the scare tactic of the moment yet drag their feet when it comes to providing an official way to monitor for the new parameters they are enacting regulations on. If they could get rid of the overload of bureaucrats and bring in good reputable scientists then I believe the agency might be able to provide good guidance with realistic goals instead of simply over reacting to the current scare of the moment.